Wednesday, December 08, 2004

Rat brain flies plane -- organic neural network

William Gibson
Florida scientists have grown a brain in a petri dish and taught it to fly a fighter plane.

The "brain", grown from 25,000 neural cells extracted from a single rat embryo, has been taught to fly an F-22 jet simulator by scientists at the University of Florida. It was taught to control the flight path, even in mock hurricane-strength winds...

When I was a youngster at CIT, one of my profs, a Dr. Hudspeth, was keen on neural networks. Back then those were arrays of silicon. Later neural networks were emulated in software. Now we build them from ... neural networks.

Gibson's blog post on this piece is a mini-snapshot of the near future.

A few months ago I posted on another use of rat brains, that time more of an intact structure. Or maybe it was a fly's neural network. Heck, I can't keep track any more.

I feel the dank chill of the nearing Singularity ...

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